Interviewed by Wes Roberts
Edited by Barbie Heit
Doug Feller,
Chief Executive Officer
Village On The Isle
Richard GanS,
president
Fergeson Skipper, PA
Ryan Thompson,
Vice President
J.L Bainbridge
Jeff Weatherhead, President
AND Chief Executive Officer
PLYMOUTH HARBOR
Let’s start by sharing a little about yourselves and what you do.
JEFF WEATHERHEAD, PLYMOUTH HARBOR: I am the CEO of Plymouth Harbor on Sarasota Bay and I’ve been there since the end of June of this year. I’ve been in the field for about 28 years, started in the retirement community world which they now call life plan communities. I started in the sales and marketing world and moved into nursing home administration in Ohio, moved from there to Florida to become an executive director in a retirement community in St. Petersburg, which ultimately took me to Jacksonville. Then I became the chief operating officer for a retirement community in Charlotte, North Carolina for eight years. And earlier in the year when my daughter had her first child, we had an opportunity to explore the possibility of coming back to Florida. Coincidentally, I replaced a man who had been in his role, Harry Hobson, for 18 years, and a very well-respected man. When I first got into this field 28 years ago, I had to take a course in order to become a nursing home administrator. Harry and his wife Nancy, who were in Ohio at the time, taught the course. So we kind of book-ended one another in terms of our careers. It’s been thrilling and I’m really glad to be back here in the Sarasota area. DOUG FELLER, VILLAGE ON THE ISLE: My dream growing up was to be a hospital administrator. And I think it’s because there would never be a time in the healthcare industry where that wasn’t something that was needed. I ended up with an internship at Plymouth Harbor which turned into a full-time position there. I then went to Alabama as a director of environmental services and was ready for something a little different, so I earned my nursing home administrator license and became their administrator on record for about five years. And then this opportunity in Florida came up, so my wife and I and our three kids, who were two-years-old at the time, packed up and moved down to Florida. I’m now with Village on the Isle. I’ve been here for close to seven years. I was promoted to COO when I arrived and then promoted to CEO about two-and-a half years ago. RYAN THOMPSON, J.L. BAINBRIDGE: In college, I had an advisor that told me that you could do about 80% of finance jobs with an accounting degree, but you could only do about 20% of accounting jobs with a finance degree. So I picked the one that just broadened my horizons the most. I am the Vice President Family Wealth Advisor at JL Bainbridge Company. We’re a wealth management firm that’s been around for about 40 years. And in Sarasota for 30 of those 40. I’ve been in financial services for a little over a decade now. I started my career as a CPA doing taxes for individuals, companies, partnerships as estate, trust, etc, and about seven years ago decided that I wanted to branch out into the wealth management world. Financial services is something that always made a lot of sense to me. Maybe it was my father who was always whipping financial discipline into me that made me realize how few people have an expertise in this area. I saw a need, I have a passion for it, and I’ve been loving my time here in Sarasota. RICHARD GANS, FERGESON SKIPPER, PA: I’m a shareholder at the Fergeson Skipper Law Firm, where I head up the firm’s estate planning and tax practice group. I’ve been a lawyer for 36 years and have done nothing but estate planning during that time. I met my wife, who is a sixth generation Floridian, in the graduate tax program at the University of Florida, which is how I decided to stay in Florida. I’ve been at this firm, at this job, pretty much in this office since 1994.
What does it mean to each of you to age gracefully?
WEATHERHEAD: Aging gracefully is allowing people to age in the way that they want, first and foremost and that requires some planning and some thought but it also means that the environments around them and the people around them are also supportive of helping that person in accomplishing what they want in this season of their lives. THOMPSON: I think having options to do what you want is a really great way to say it. To me the way that you do that as Jeff was saying is by planning. That can mean a lot. That can be very, very detailed. That can be very, very broad. But that at least, especially from a financial perspective is the linchpin of everything. The future’s inherently uncertain, so you do the best you can. You’re not setting these things in stone, but planning for a certain lifestyle that you strive for and achieving that would be aging gracefully to me. FELLER: I’d say it’s living your best life. You’ve worked your tail off all your life to get to this point. Now you can sit back, retire and live your true best life. GANS: I think it’s to have your priorities straight in life, to be strong in what you believe in, to have good health, to do things that continue to be meaningful to you and that give meaning to your life.
During COVID, all of us reassessed our priorities and the roles that people have in our lives. That has to have had a magnified effect on how we live.
WEATHERHEAD: I think one of the lessons I’m learning coming out of the pandemic is that it’s the people that make all the difference. During Covid, we did everything early on to keep people safe. And it was the right thing to do. We didn’t know what to expect, but we went into severe lockdown mode. The impact of that social isolation has been profound. People who were otherwise healthy, active people, aged dramatically throughout the pandemic. I ran into a resident when we first started allowing people to return to eating in the dining room together. And he looked at me with huge tears in his eyes, and he said, “This is my first meal with another human being in eight months.” Up to that point he was this very, very intellectual, very dynamic, physically fit,engaging guy. He passed away six months later. The toll of that isolation was so powerful. I’m 55 years old—it’s kind of a lesson to me about continuing to plan, but don’t keep waiting for that perfect time to do something or it could pass you by. FELLER: Jeff, you hit it right on the head. I think the first case in Florida was at Doctor’s Hospital. It was a Thursday afternoon or a Friday afternoon, and we came into work on the following Saturday and we said, “All right, how do we lock this campus down?” And within 24 hours, we literally had everything shut down. Our dining room closed, our multiple entrances on campus, they were barricaded. And this was at the beginning when nobody really knew what was going on. We had to immediately make changes because we still needed to occupy the apartments and everything went virtual. Even our fitness classes went virtual. As we grew a little bit and learned a little more, we opened up a little bit. I remember having conversations about how this was out of our control, but what was worse? Taking your chances and getting Covid or dying of isolation, because both of them have their adverse effects on us as humans. We’re just socially driven. GANS: There’s nothing like a pandemic to get people motivated to do estate planning. The biggest manifestation of it is that my clients and prospects and people that I deal with are much, much more demanding than they were before. People are impatient. Covid sort of put the possibility of dying pretty much front of mind for everybody. I lost six clients to Covid in 2020 in about three months. I think just fear and a sense that my world is important to me and I need it to be as important to you as it is to me. You’d like to say that you can always deliver that, but maybe that’s not practical.
Ryan, in terms of how people plan for their finances, I feel like people, especially those with substantial assets, may be more attentive to making sure they are stable rather than enjoying the freedoms those assets may provide. Is that accurate?
THOMPSON: I think the thing that may have changed more than anything is not necessarily the advice that we would give to people about how to allocate or how to manage, or what they need to be thinking about. You know, realistically those things—even though these sort of large events that we went through over the last couple years are different than anything in the past. The answer is almost always to stay the course on the plan. Because, going back to the financial crisis was different. The tragedy of 9/11 was different. The Asian currency crisis of the early 90s was different. Black Monday in 1987— that was different. The right perspective, at least from an investing standpoint, is to stay invested and stay the course. What has changed is the way that people want to live. Some people have been much more attuned to saving for the long term, focusing on retirement by working a five- or 10-year plan. Other people may have just said, “I don’t care about any of that anymore, life is too short.” And then it’s on us to try to tweak the plan at least slightly to accomplish those that change in goals. But really everything from our perspective, it starts with the plan and it really ends with the plan as well. And like I said earlier, because those future events are uncertain, you have to tweak it. You always have to tweak it, because things always change, whether you intend for them to or not.
How do your clients think about their legacy, their financial legacy or their legacy of engagement with their families? How does that feed into their plan?
THOMPSON: That is a very personal topic of conversation. Some people want their kids to never work or never have to worry about anything. Some people may have kids and don’t want to give their kids anything. So how you accomplish it, again, just goal setting. GANS: For married people with children, it’s very important to them to make sure that their spouse is taken care of and it’s very important to make sure that their children are taken care of. People are increasingly concerned about protecting their legacy as it passes down to the spouse who may live a long time and become susceptible to outside influence or perhaps not be as sharp as they used to be. That’s very concerning to people as they live longer. Another thing that’s concerning to people is to protect assets that go down to children from the bad things that happen to good people sometimes. So you get divorced, or there’s a behavioral or substance problem, just some sort of dysfunction there, they want to set it up so that the money having been passed down to their children doesn’t go to waste.
Is there a level of assets at which it becomes a lot more complicated to protect them?
GANS: Whatever the level of the estate is, you have to deal with it. The less money you have, the more it hurts to lose it, I think. So in my world I get clients that will come in and say, “Well, I don’t have enough money for a trust.” And that’s not the case. I think the opposite is true. In this case, they talk about a revocable trust, which is a probate avoidance mechanism. And I think people think, “Well, you’ve gotta have a lot of money to have a revocable trust.” And I think the opposite is true. The less money you have, maybe the more important it is to avoid probate because there are fees involved with something like that. And the less money you have, the less you can afford to have something bad happen to it. And so it’s not an asset-driven thing. It’s a facts-of-life-driven thing.
When planning for the potentiality of moving into a life-planned community, when do you start talking to your clients about that?
THOMPSON: It’s definitely a sliding scale. One major factor is age. Another seems obvious, but I say it anyway, is just the number of resources. If you have limited resources, it’s much more important to plan for what your options are going to be. WEATHERHEAD: My father-in-law called me a couple years ago. He was 81, and after his 80th birthday when we had all gone to visit him and he realized, my family can’t stay in this small house, he said he wanted to buy another house so we would have another bedroom and people could come visit. And he called me and he said, “Is this crazy? I’m 81 and I’m thinking about buying a larger home?” And I said, “So everything you say yes to, you’re saying no to something else. So if you say yes to buying a bigger house, what do you have to either give up or what are you gonna say no to, potentially? And if it’s not going to impact your financial life dramatically to do it, but brings you joy on the other side? Yep, go for it. But if the converse is true that by doing this, you can’t live the daily life the way you want to, then maybe rethink that plan.”
How would you help someone think about their choices and the trade-off?
WEATHERHEAD: When someone comes to our community and expresses interest, my first question is “What is it that you want to do with the rest of your life? And how can Plymouth Harbor be a part of your world? Is it that you want this dwelling with a great location on the water so that you feel peace and serenity when you wake up? Is it the amenities programs, fitness, dining? Is it not needing to clean your place or is it that you want to travel for half the year? Or you want to be able to lock up your apartment, then leave and know it’s going to be secure? So it always starts with “what do you want”. Then let’s talk about how we might fit into that scenario for you. And then if that’s a match, then what’s it going to cost to do that, and if all those things marry up, you know, then often that question ends with “what would keep you from saying yes?” And usually it’s, “I probably should be doing this.” FELLER: I’m going to play off of what Jeff said. We had a resident move in about a year ago when the housing market was booming. She was able to sell her home within about three days. She knew she wanted to be there and wondered if it was the right time for her to move. She was probably a little younger than what she anticipated but knew she wanted to retire on the island of Venice and this was her condo on the island. She could travel, she could do whatever she wanted to do. She could live her normal life. It really depends on what you’re looking for. For the healthcare side of things, I think it is just nice to have, but what people are really looking for is figuring out how they can do everything that they’re doing now and maybe opening up more opportunities for them to enjoy life a little more. So there’s this kind of the misperception that I think we have as an industry. But that’s what our goal is to find out what can we do to enhance the way they live.
Years ago, I was serving on a local board with someone who told me that he and his wife had prioritized their retirement based on three factors. I’ll share them with you and ask that you then choose the one you think is the most important. He said to be happy in retirement, you need to focus on being healthy, wealthy, and wise. Can you make the case for prioritizing those categories—healthy, wealthy, and wise?
THOMPSON: Well, to me, it’s a little esoteric, but wealth is really time. You know, while you’re working, you’re always trading your time for something else, whether it’s ability to move up or money or you’re trading your time spent with loved ones and the emotion of feeling that goes along with that. But as you get older it seems to me at this point that the number one hold on your time would be health. So I would say health first. WEATHERHEAD: I’m going to go with wisdom because I come from this vantage point of working with people who have always been older than me.I think the oldest resident that I’ve ever had the pleasure to serve was 105 and the youngest was, I think 62. So several generations all at the same time. I think with wisdom, you can be wealthy if it were gifted to you, but if you weren’t wise, you could squander it. I might not be healthy anymore, but if I’m wise, I can be passing that on to somebody. So I’m going to firmly anchor myself in wisdom. FELLER: I would have to say health. I can also totally appreciate everything Jeff said about wisdom. It’s just kind of parallel— wisdom and health—but I’d say if you don’t have good health, everything else is kind of secondary to it. So I definitely would pick health all day long. GANS: I would say from what I’ve seen, health is probably the number one thing. I’ve observed my clients over the years lose their health and it affects their ability to enjoy the wealth that they’ve accumulated. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have that much. It’s hard for me to see people who were once dynamic and then there’s a health reversal and their life just gets smaller and smaller to where it’s reduced to just health. And that eliminates the ability to be wise and wealthy. When health concerns take over your life, it makes you worry about spending all the money. There’s a lot of anxiety that goes with that health. WEATHERHEAD: I recently went to Denver for the leading age conference. I am in my mid- fifties this year and have a new granddaughter—it’s changed a lot of perspectives. I heard this phrase that I took back to our programming people, and the phrase was that we age into an ever-increasing ever-shrinking box—we lose a spouse and the box becomes smaller, we move into a different home and the box comes smaller. So my challenge to my team was to figure out how to kind of blow up that box, whether it’s skydiving at 93 or having somebody go back to school to finish a degree they couldn’t because they were in World War II. How do we help expand what the possibilities could be, and again, it all goes back to have you planned well enough to be able to do it.
What advice would you give or do you give to the loved ones in your life as to how to plan for the late stages of life? You get to see people who didn’t take care of their health. They didn’t take care of their finances, they didn’t take care of whatever it might have been, or their family relationships.
WEATHERHEAD: For me it is kind of focused on living a joyful life and plan. Start early. You cannot start planning early enough. I grew up in a house that my parents didn’t plan well and my mom’s options at this point are severely hindered by what she can afford to do. Having a family that says, we’ll support you later in life, it’s gives you the warm fuzzies to hear, but the first time that your parent has to call and ask, “Can you buy this for me because I don’t have the money to do it,” is such a humbling experience for them. So the lesson that I’m learning from my parents is try to be smarter about how we plan, but don’t limit ourselves so that we also can’t do the things we want to do. As a grandfather, how do I modify that plan so that my children and grandchildren will be able to experience some of the really cool things that my wife and I have? So it’s always rebalancing the plan with the priorities and not getting so fixated on the line that you can’t vary. Occasionally just test the waters a little bit. FELLER: I tell my kids even where they are now, find something that you love to do and go be the best at it. Everything else will fall into place. A lot of people choose careers because that’s where the money is but I tell them that’s secondary. Your happiness comes first. Go find a job that you never have to take a vacation from because you love what you do every single day. I truly think that from the financial standpoint, from the planning, we as parents just need to do a good job of instilling the importance of planning. I had wonderful parents that taught me how to plan. My parents’ problem is they don’t get out and enjoy anything they plan so well. They don’t enjoy life. You’ve gotta enjoy your life at the same time, not just prepare for the worst. That may or may not happen. GANS: I would say to get your house in order. And, what that means is to take care of the things that you know you should do, like estate planning, and maybe long-term care insurance and things of that nature. That’s sort of the homework of doing this. People are living longer. I think that there’s more of a chance for sort of a coda to life. And, if you’re purposeful about what that coda to life is, you can have a lot of new and great experiences when you’re retired, and make all that hard work that you put in worth the effort. Retirement gracefully isn’t, “Now I’m done. Hopefully, there’s an element of anticipation of some new opportunities and some new things to do and some refreshing things and changes positively in your life. A discussion of things like health care proxies and powers of attorney does need to happen. Essentially, what they all do is they allow the client to appoint somebody whom they trust to make healthcare decisions, which could include selecting a long term care facility, making arrangements for in-home care, whatever seems to be appropriate at the time. The state of Florida will write your will for you if you don’t have one. But they don’t write a healthcare proxy for you. And so if you haven’t made this prearrangement, you’ll get a guardian appointed for you. And there’s a place for guardianships. But they’re relatively easily avoided by having a healthcare proxy in place. And the financial counterpart of that’s called a durable power of attorney. And that’s what allows people to appoint somebody in advance to say, “Hey, if I can’t manage my financial affairs, I need you to do that for me.” So with a combination of all that stuff, if somebody does have to go into a long-term care facility, you’ve got a team in place who can help make financial and healthcare decisions if the person just can’t or doesn’t want to do that. In terms of how you pay for it, there’s a federal program administered by the states, Medicaid, and there’s a long term nursing home benefit for Medicaid. But it’s a means tested benefit, and you cannot have a whole heck of a lot of money or income in order to qualify for Medicaid. And if you make transfers to your children to sort of gift all your assets so that when the time comes to apply for Medicaid, you don’t have any, there’s a lot of complicated rules about that.
Richard, could you tell us about pet trusts.
GANS: For the past 15 or so years, under Florida law and the law of many other states, we are allowed to set up a trust for a pet. The reason that I’m not enamored of that is that there’s a lot of care and maintenance to something like that. And somebody’s gonna get that asset after the pet dies. That person is not going to have the same attitude toward that pet as the person whose pet it was.
If somebody moves to Florida from another state, are their documents still valid?
GANS: If someone moves here from another state, it’s not necessary to drop everything, get a driver’s license, go see the lawyer, but the first thing to do is to take care of those health proxies and powers of attorney.
Ryan, as a relatively new father, how has the experience changed the way you think about the planning that you do?
THOMPSON: The biggest realization in being a new father was that almost everything my parents told me was right, but I never wanted to believe them, which is kind of hilarious. But the thing that I would say to someone who might walk into my office is that it’s okay to ask for help. There are all kinds of statistics out there that say that people that work with an advisor end up better just because of some of the things we talked about from the very onset, they’re just not aware of some of the risks and pitfalls that are out there to encounter. And rather than learning the hard way, why not have someone that can raise a flag and say, hey, you should be thinking about this. Everything starts with the plan and failing
to plan is planning to fail, so to speak.
